What if blogging were understood not merely as an online publishing tool, but as a place on Earth?

For many of us in educational technology, blogging has long been framed as digital writing, content creation, or reflection within networked systems. Yet over time, it has become entangled with platform logics—metrics, visibility, virality, and algorithmic amplification—that distance it from lived experience and local community. This session proposes a different framing: blogging as a situated, embodied, place-based practice.

Drawing on the development of bava.studio—a physical storefront and cultural experiment in Trento, Italy—this talk explores what happens when a blog is grounded in a material location. Rather than operating as a transactional or attention-driven space, bava.studio functions as a site of encounter, curiosity, and conversation. Blog posts inform installations. Archives become objects. Digital reflections spill into street-facing windows. Events unfold without social media campaigns. The blog becomes less a content stream and more a locus of presence.

Through this experiment, I ask: What might educational technology look like if it were accountable to place? What happens when blogging is uncoupled from platform imperatives and reconnected to embodied community? How might we design digital practices that support local culture, sustained reflection, and meaningful encounter?

At a moment when educational technology prioritizes scale, efficiency, and automation, this session offers a provocation: perhaps blogging’s enduring power lies not in reach, but in rootedness. By reimagining blogging as place-making, we can rethink how digital practices foster connection, identity, and community in the real world.

Participants will leave with conceptual frameworks and practical inspiration for rethinking blogging—and educational technology more broadly—as practices grounded not only in networks, but in neighborhoods.

Description / Narrative

Over the past two decades working online, I have moved through higher education technology spaces—both digital and physical—while increasingly asking: What is lost when our digital practices are untethered from material context and place? And conversely, what might blogging become if grounded in the places where people are together?

That question became urgent after the COVID-19 pandemic and my relocation to Northern Italy, far from previous institutional roles and communities. The result was bava.studio—a storefront and physical outpost of a blog. It is not transactional, metric-driven, or designed to “go viral.” Instead, it is an experiment in wonder, conversation, and embodied community engagement.

In this session, I trace the evolution of that experiment—from blog reflections to shop-window dioramas, from unadvertised local events to treating a blog post as a physical object in space. Along the way, I explore the intentional choices behind these practices: what blogging as place asks us to reconsider about the people—the “Who?”—at the center of our edtech community; how uncoupling blogging from platform logic creates room for embodied dialogue and local presence; and what becomes possible when archives, media, artifacts, and conversation are treated as materials of a physical learning environment.

This talk is both reflection and provocation. What would it mean for educational technologies to support blogging that is situated, community-embedded, and place-sensitive rather than optimized for anonymity and virality?

Key Takeaways

Participants will leave with a framework for understanding blogging beyond the screen as a practice of place and public encounter; insights from a real-world initiative blending blogging with physical space and community-making; and questions to guide the reimagining of digital tools in service of real places and relationships.

Why This Matters for EdTech

Educational technology often privileges scale, interaction, and platform efficiency. Yet the material contexts of learning—the spaces where people gather around ideas and culture—are often overlooked. Reframing blogging as place-making expands what digital practice can contribute to learning, community, and identity in the real world.